Basic questions re suitability of virtualbox

[hangerglide]

OK, thanks for that tip about hardware virtualization.

I've not been able to get Oracle 11g to install on a guest os windows 2003 x84. I set it up with 1 ram. The installer starts and after the various options have been set up, and the install should start, it just closes. Not very encouraging re hosting my oracle stuff in vbox. Anyone have suggestions?

[Perryg]

Since you are using Windows 2003 it more than likely is the low ram. Windows 2003 may work at that or even less but throw Oracle 11g in the picture and the install is going to go straight to swap.
Put it at 1.5Gig if you can and see if it will install then you can bring it down a bit after that. Also make sure that the VRam in the guest is no higher than 10 meg.
I installed 10g in Windows XPpro and it works good at 768meg and better at 1024meg, but XP does not require the amount of memory that Windows server 2003 does.

[hangerglide]

I should have written windows 2008.

I bumped the vm memory to 1500. I had to reboot the host before the vm would even boot (couldn't lock memory msg). Then it did boot, but the oracle install failed just as before.

Does it seem like a pretty safe bet that if I move the host to window 7 64 bit with 8g ram I'll be able to leave these kinds of issues behind? New pc of course.

Thanks for you help.

[Perryg]

I think you will find it will work just fine once you have enough resources to run Windows 2008 and Oracle. As I said I have Oracle 10g working just fine in XP but that puppy does not require as much RAM as W 2008.
Just be careful that if you use 64 bit that you have the right Oracle package. I have not dealt with trying to run the 32 bit version in a 64 bit OS. You might want to read up on that too.

Also something else you might want to watch out for is you can not run two virtualizers that are set to hardware-v at the same time so no XP mode in Win 7 if you want to use VirtualBox.

[hangerglide]

Thanks again Perry. The tip about xp mode is esp good. I just finished getting that going on my windows 7 notebook and had not realized that it was a one vt at a time situation. I think that means that it'd be ok to run either virtualbox OR windows 7 mode, at different times...just not concurrently?

xp mode for win 7 seems like it's going to be useful, I have some software that seems to dislike windows 7.

The other thing that I was just kicking around was the idea of having the windows 2008 vm act as a domain controller. I guess that is possible from what I've read (not re virtualbox, more in general vms). I'm not much of a network admin but I would like to get the network connectivity and file sharing here more unified...I think AD must be the best way to do that. But I don't really want to run a separate pc for that, ie mainly for AD. Not sure if it's a practical idea or not.